


chivalry for mindreaders (and other bad ideas)

by queenieofaces



Series: a wizard named B. Ham [1]
Category: New World Magischola (Live-Action Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Asexual Character, Bullying, Gen, NWM1, Too Many Feelings About Birds, also Xel and Sam appear for approximately two seconds, six pages of knight metaphors and parallelism, tiny queer Latina wizard disaster child, way too many emotions about names and naming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 14:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8212417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenieofaces/pseuds/queenieofaces
Summary: A series of moments in the life of one B. Ham.
(See notes for warnings and spoilers.)





	

 

Every story has to start somewhere, so let’s start this one here: Sir Beatrisa kneeling before her king, wand clasped over her heart, sword sheathed.  The villagers have been rescued from the shadow monster, and the realm is safe once more.  She is justly rewarded, the people cheer, and everyone lives happily ever after.

***

Or perhaps we could start here instead: The sadness that begins creeping up on her just after her ninth birthday, a strange emptiness that nestles beneath her ribs.  It soaks into her bones and suffuses her breath, ebbing and flowing like a tide of tar.  Her parents fuss over her, wands flicking to check for some sign of illness, and consult in whispers about the possibility of a Jiwa Setan.

By the time the Hamiltons realize that their daughter is destined to be an astromancer, not a healer, it’s too late and the damage is already done.

***

Her father leaves quietly.  Her mother remains, but leaves in her own way.

Beatrisa stays and stays and stays.

***

Beatrisa leaves her wooden sword in the closet at her mother’s house when she leaves for P2A4.  She leaves the crown of leaves, now brown and brittle, that once adorned her father’s head.  She leaves her mother sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of tea cooling in her hands.

Bea leaves.

***

Children are not kind.  Perhaps this should not be surprising to her, but the realization leaves her breathless and sick to her stomach.

A corollary revelation: Children are not kind, and she has an enormous target pinned to her back.

She gets used to the taunts and jeers, to the pranks they think are so clever, to the shoes full of slugs and pockets full of spiders.  She gets used, too, to the things that go unsaid, to the thoughts she catches accidentally when she brushes shoulders with someone in the hallway, when she bumps hands passing a quill, when she’s too tired to properly shield herself from every stray thought and flash of emotion.

She makes herself small, she makes herself quiet, and she hopes that eventually things will blow over.

***

Things don’t blow over.

An older student (she pretends years later that she doesn’t remember his name, but she’s never been very good at pretending) corners her right at the edge of the forest.  He has a group of friends with him.  It’s the end of November, and the wind stings her face and plucks at her coat, but she needed a break from…everybody, from everything.  She’s at the end of her rope, rung out, worn down, utterly exhausted by a week of mispronunciations of her name and snipes in her book bag and new magic that rattles her entire body.

He calls her a name, flicks his wand and hurls a ball of mud at her face.  Her hands are slow to rise, and he makes a joke about how the look suits her, his friends laughing in agreement.  It is, in the grand scheme of things, inconsequential, yet another moment to add to the tally of children being unkind, another example she’ll abstract years later in an impassioned plea for equal treatment of mages regardless of heritage.

She tries to run.

He grabs her hair and _yanks_.

Without thinking, she grasps his wrist and _projects_.  She hurls every bit of frustration, every time she’s cried since she arrived at this strange school, every moment of crushing isolation.  She dredges up the bits of tar that cling to her bones, the constant uneasiness that sits in her gut, the pressure of hundreds of eyes and minds and whispers that weigh down her shoulders.

He collapses, and she runs and runs and runs and doesn’t look back.

***

Neither of them reports the incident.  Bea has migraines for a week afterward, but he has uncontrollable fits of crying for the rest of the year.  The bullying grinds to a halt, but the whispers increase in volume.

This is how she learns she is something dangerous, a naked blade swung by an untrained arm.  As soon as her head is clear enough to form a coherent thought, she writes the first draft of her rules for mindreading—her code of chivalry—in block letters she is careful not to smudge.  A sword can be sheathed, and she can be kept in check.

She is still quiet, but she doesn’t bother making herself small anymore.  She introduces herself with her full name, lifts her chin, and dares her peers to comment.

***

The trial by burning approaches.  She’s one of the youngest to take it—her birthday is only a few weeks before Samhain—so perhaps that explains the…lack of…well.  There’s a fire that’s ignited among her peers, a creeping warmth when a particular girl smiles or when a particular boy flips his hair.  She can feel the butterflies in their stomachs, can feel the sudden breathlessness, the highs and lows and itch for something she can’t quite name.  She monitors herself, anticipates feelings that never come, watches and waits for the inevitable fall.

As she looks over the field of hot coals, her bare toes anxiously scrunching into the soft earth, she wonders if walking through the fire will transform her.

She emerges unscathed and unchanged.

***

Two years later she starts wearing the ring.  It dampens the hubbub in her head, softens the blast that accompanies every brush of fingertips.  More than that, it grounds her, weighing her down with solid pressure and the reminder that there are others in the world like her.  She has a thousand excuses if anyone asks her about it, but no one does.  The people who matter already know, and those who don’t matter don’t care.

She starts using the word a few months later, the sounds unfamiliar on her tongue but tasting like home.

***

She can’t point to the moment when she gave up on being a Marshal and decided to be a court mindreader.  Maybe it was when she left her sword in the closet.  Maybe it was when she realized that she needed to be kept in check.  Maybe it was when she saw Vita fighting back with her words and her wits and every scrap of ground she could take and realized she was not built for that life.  Maybe it was one of the nights where she got caught in her own head and could only find sleep after she rewrote her rules and included a provision that, no matter what, she had to use her magic for the greater good, turn the crap hand she had been dealt into something _useful_.

In any case, when she tells the guidance counselor that she is planning on becoming a court mindreader, her back is straight and her hands are steady and she can barely hear her own disappointment.

***

She prefers not to talk about the trial by drowning.

***

Beatrisa Alejandra Hamilton, mixed heritage, mixed race, court mindreader in training, P2A4 graduate, is rejected by Imperial Magischola of Massachusetts Bay.

She pretends she isn’t disappointed, but she’s never been very good at pretending.

***

The week before she leaves for New World Magischola, she stands outside her mother’s bedroom door after she has gone to sleep, feels the tar pooling around her ankles, and thinks, _I could fix this_.

She doesn’t, but she hates herself for the thought and forces herself to copy her rules onto the last page of her new notebook as penitence.

***

She faces herself at the Dan Obeah initiation and feels fear sink its teeth into her throat.  There should be nothing frightening about seeing herself standing encircled by her new housemates, but there’s a gleam in her double’s eye, a set to her jaw that scares her.  She looks at herself and sees what she has the potential to be and swears before the house to transform herself into something more _useful_.

***

The first-year Dan Obeah astromancers are a strange trio.  Bea is nervous energy tempered with inflexibility, back straight and fingers constantly in motion.  Monty is affable and well-meaning, easy smiles and unsolicited advice drawn from a tarot deck.  Persie is pure charisma, a tremendous amount of power masked with cattiness and superficiality.

Bea likes Monty, because Monty is intrinsically likable, even when she has to pull extra weight on group projects because of his poor romantic choices.  She can’t figure out how she feels about Persie.  Persie is like the sun or a forest fire—beautiful and terrifying and all-consuming if you get too close.  Persie is everything Bea could be if she’d lived a different life, if she hadn’t kneeled and sworn her service to the greater good, if she used her mindreading to navigate social situations instead of avoid them.  Some days Bea looks at Persie and is irrationally jealous and some days she’s repulsed and some days it’s both and she doesn’t know how to work out the knot in her stomach.

Persie decides to be horrible to her almost right off the bat, and Bea is guiltily thankful that her feelings on Persie are suddenly simplified.  She can look at Persie and see a boy, a few years older than her, cornering her at the edge of the woods.  She can see someone who sees her but doesn’t really see _her_.  She lifts her chin and introduces herself with her full name.

***

If Persie is fire, Jos is ice and steel and coiled power.  Her mind is sharp and cold and utterly focused, a lance with impeccable aim, a catapult loaded and ready to be loosed.  It is breathtaking and Bea can’t look away.

When Jos approaches Bea with a request—help her monitor for Aphotic Bane, catch the symptoms as early as she can—she agrees immediately.  She wants to be _useful_ , but she also wants to see more, to feel more, to be closer.  She wants to soak up the cold and marvel at the stark brightness.  She watches for any gap in Jos’s memory, scans for the slightest slip, and frets and frets and frets.

Five months in she thinks, _Oh no_ , but by that point it’s too late and the damage is already done.

Bea writes another draft of her rules that night, hands shaking and stomach twisting in guilt.

***

Jos mentions that she’ll be at the Aphotic Bane Charity Auction over summer break, and Bea volunteers to meet her there after her internship.  It’s a bad idea, as so many things are, but Bea doesn’t care.  For once, she can be _useful_.  For once, she doesn’t have to go straight home to her mother sitting at the kitchen table.  On a good day, maybe she would join her in cooking dinner, frying plantains and seasoning chicken, but there have been fewer and fewer good days recently.  It’s much more likely she would just be sitting there, staring at nothing, and Bea would have to wade through tar to get both of them through the rest of the day.  Better to stand awkwardly at Jos’s side while she can and offer what little support she’s able.

***

Maybe we could start our story here instead: Bea nervously taking notes at her first Disciplinary Tribunal meeting, resentful of the first-year with the gall to waltz in with only a family connection, and trying desperately to prove that she deserves her spot, that she can be _useful_.

Or maybe here: Bea standing shoulder to shoulder with Xel and Sam, warding the Dan Obeah common room as Jos frantically tries to cure a wendigo bite and the storm rages outside.

Or maybe even here: Bea breaking a glass in the alchemy lab and Persie striking back with verbal barbs and hexed potion beads as Bea wraps herself in righteous anger.

Patterns repeat.  Themes reemerge.  A new school year starts.  Life goes on.

***

Jos removes herself from The Conclave, citing her Aphotic Bane, and Bea nearly follows.  Despite the panic bubbling around her as half her peers realize they are missing their magic, her head is blessedly quiet, only her own voice echoing in her mind. For a few frightening moments she considers just giving it all up.  Maybe her magic will come back on its own.  Until then, she could use a break from…everybody, from everything.  She never wanted to be a mindreader—she wanted to be a knight, a Marshal, a hero not a weapon.  She just wants a moment of quiet, a mode of existence that doesn’t necessitate pages and pages of rules written in a shaky hand.  She just wants a steady hand to wield her and a lord to be lain before in a pledge of fealty.

She bites her cheek so hard she draws blood, but in the end she doesn’t leave the circle.  Her mindreading comes back, her mental shields suddenly too flimsy for the force of it, and with it comes a flood of memories of things that never happened to her and emotions she’s never felt.

She doesn’t know if she should feel relieved or not.

***

In the wake of The Conclave, something shifts.

Persie apologizes, and Bea ignores the tangled knot of emotion in her chest.  Jos tells the house about her Aphotic Bane, and Bea takes the leap (Monty shoves her over the edge) to ask Jos to the formal, tripping over her own tongue in the process.  Dan Obeah swears to protect the first-years, and then swears again to protect each other, no matter what.

When Bea faces herself at the Dan Obeah initiation, she sees only herself, hair wild, eyes wide.  She lifts her chin and addresses herself with her full name.

***

Elliot Cayne is careful planning wrapped around a desire to protect that overrides everything else.  Elliot is lightning and poison, a snare hidden in the dark, a flame protected by cupped hands.  

Bea shoves Elliot back toward the Tribunal room, shouts for a Marshal and restraints and justice. She is righteous anger and crashing fury, a sword held to the throat of evil. She is _useful_.

When she hesitates to name Persie as Elliot's co-conspirator, she feels herself begin to slip.  Persie comes when she is called, enters the makeshift courtroom quietly and gives her testimony in a strong, steady voice. Bea sees her righteous anger mirrored in Elliot's face, her solid certainty embodied by Persie, and it hurts her head (her heart) to look at either of them.

She wraps her mantle of righteous anger more and more tightly around herself even as it shades into buzzing blankness. Anger has always been easier than resonance, but Bea has never been very good at pretending.

***

This is the worst second day of school Bea has ever had.

***

There is another universe where Vita doesn’t intervene, where Bea melts down and shakes apart completely alone.  There is another universe where, when Bea realizes that she can’t keep herself in check, that it’s entirely possible that she’s subjective and biased and has been blindly swinging a naked blade, she doesn’t have a voice of reason to talk her down.  There is a universe where she swears fealty to the wrong king, where she snatches up a warped code of chivalry just to have something solid beneath her feet.

There is another universe where this story ends quite badly.

***

“I’m sorry,” she says, when she sees Persie at the formal, and she means it.

She pulls herself to her full height, back straight, hands steady, and means that too.

***

She takes Jos’s offered hand and for a moment doesn’t consider whether or not she is being _useful_.

***

In the chaos after the house cup announcement, there is shouting and crying and cawing and applauding as fast and hard as their hands can shake.  There is Jos’s fierce embrace and the heady rush of victory.  There is the sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger than herself.

Beatrisa has not been knighted.  There’s no happy ending, no realm to save, no just reward, but still.

But still.

She lets herself be swept up in the cheer and it tastes like home.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first piece of fiction I've written in more than four years, what the frick. It's also probably the least dialogue I've ever included in a sizable piece of fiction? What is happening in my life.
> 
> Will this make sense to anyone who didn't play in NWM1? Will it makes sense to anyone other than me? Your guess is as good as mine.
> 
> I apologize to anyone whose character I have mischaracterized and blame it all on Bea being a very unreliable narrator.
> 
> Necessary warnings: Bea has a genuinely terrible and warped self-image and a metric ton of anxiety. There's a character with pretty severe depression. There is some brief bullying.
> 
> Spoilers: Very minimal--some backstory stuff that hasn't leaked yet, although some of it can definitely be inferred if you have the time and patience (and a lot of it could have been heard via rumors, especially if you were at P2A4 and/or live in Destiny). Also some NWM1-specific spoilers, which shouldn't matter for anyone who didn't play and if you did play, unless you have been living under a rock, you already know that Elliot and Persie got arrested.


End file.
